Matthew C. Farmer
In a fragment of Theopompus’ lost comedy “The Pleasure-Loving Man” (Ἡδυχάρης, fr.
16), one character explains to another that nobody can be sure of anything these days, “since one
is no longer one, and even two is hardly one, as Plato says.” The speaker’s reference to the
philosopher Plato led August Meineke, the great 19th century editor of comedy, to suppose that
Plato was a character in the play, that the title was an ironic nickname for him, and that the play
was, therefore, essentially a joke about Plato’s infamously dry manner of living.
Meineke was a masterful editor of fragmentary literature, but his conclusions about
Theopompus’ comedy form a classic example of how far astray we can go when we ask
fragments the wrong questions. With Greek comedy, the most tempting questions – what was the
plot? who were the characters? who are the objects of mockery and satire? where is the poet’s
voice? – often yield the most misleading answers, and a compelling but baseless reconstruction
of a fragmentary play can close off more productive avenues of inquiry for generations. It would
be delightful to know that Theopompus had written a comedy about Plato, and it’s painful to
reject Meineke’s reconstruction, as Kaibel finally did; in a sense we lose the comedy all over
again, as the fragments cease to resemble a play and become once more a heap of disiecta
membra.
The fragments of Greek comedy are undergoing a renaissance. Sparked by the
appearance of Kassel and Austin’s magisterial edition and a now-famous conference on the
“Rivals of Aristophanes”, critics of comedy have begun to produce monographs on individual
poets, translations and commentaries of the fragments, and collections of essays on the world of
comedy beyond Aristophanes. The most insightful products of this revival have been the work of
critics who not only resist the urge to force the fragments to answer old, unanswerable questions
of plot and cast, but who find new questions the comic fragments can answer.
In this paper I use the fragments of Theopompus, a younger contemporary of
Aristophanes, as a case study illustrating new approaches to this material. Fragment 16, for
example, can tell us something about the scene it was excerpted from if we resist for a moment
the allure of that name “Plato” and focus instead on the inconspicuous particle γάρ: whoever this
character is, his γάρ shows us he is using this garbled reference to the Phaedo to prove a point;
already in the early fourth century, then, Theopompus’ audience could understand the use of
Plato’s name to win an argument. Plato, it turns out, is mentioned by name about a dozen times
in fourth-century comedy, sometimes with accurate allusions to his views, sometimes not, and
the reference to him in Ἡδυχάρης is much more useful against this background than it is as a
tool for uncovering the plot of Theopompus’ play or the meaning of its title.
The hundred or so fragments that remain of Theopompus yield various riches when we
look to them for something other than the missing plots of his comedies: close attention to
citation context, for example, reveals an Odysseus in fr. 34 who praises the accuracy of a
Homeric simile; fr. 5, when connected with jokes in Nicochares and Plato Comicus, becomes
part of a capping game among a group of comic poets who seek to outdo one another by
comparing the wealthy Philonides to various disgusting animals. Drawing on the work I have done in
preparing a commentary on Theopompus, I use the comic fragments in this paper to showcase
the possibilities we can unlock when we stop asking fragments the questions we want answers to,
and ask instead the questions the fragments themselves want to answer.